Last Wednesday RSpec 2.8 was released with rspec-rails 2.8.1 a day later. This new version has improved documentation, better support for tags and filtering, a new order option which allows you to run your specs in random order to find order-dependency bugs, a new rspec -init option which will create a spec directory and some starter code for a blank project, and a dramatic speed boost.

Nate did some investigation to figure out why RSpec 2.8 was faster. What he found is that they've reimplemented every built-in matcher which ships with RSpec to use classes, instead of the Matcher DSL.

Dmitriy Nagirnyak recently released a new gem called knockout-rails, which gives you a pretty painless way to integrate your Rails application with KnockoutJS and allows you to bring some model validation, events, and callbacks forward to the client’s browser.

With Rubinius 2.0 in the works, we will soon have a version of Ruby (other then JRuby) which can make the best use of all your CPUs using threads. However, there wasn't a Ruby web server built to handle concurrency with threads efficiently so Konstantin Haase and Even Phoenix have been working on a new web server called Puma.

Previous Episodes

In the first episode of 2012 we learn about a DOS in Ruby 1.8.7, Ember.js for Rails 3.1, Rails is still cool, Graylog2, Decorator implementations, and lastly we learn why Nate still wears yellow underwear like Hulk Hogan.js

Presto! We go to Kathmandu to Track some elusive Spatial Data Formats with Cookies, head back to the States to meet Jenkins, and slowly stagger back while trying to pronounce Vendorer on this episode of Ruby5.